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Slide Show | Witnessing Dignity Amid Death in Guatemala’s Civil War The 1980s brought even more massacres and disappearances during Guatemala’s civil war. Robert Nickelsberg documented the devastating effects of that violence on Mayan villages.

Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

Witnessing Dignity Amid Death in Guatemala’s Civil War

By ROBERT NICKELSBERG

November 29, 2017

The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Guatemala City wondered why Time Magazine would want to photograph and interview the ambassador there. After all, in the early 1980s, the political upheaval and violence in nearby El Salvador — where I was based — dominated the headlines. We should have kept covering the civil war there, the spokesman said, since there really wasn’t anything worth covering in Guatemala.

But that only hardened our resolve to take a closer look. We redoubled our efforts to report on the military and opposition groups ensnared in what would ultimately be a 36-year conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Maya, between 1960 and 1996. Some 45,000 victims disappeared, while more than one million people were displaced. Yet this conflict raged on in relative obscurity and mystery, even as the 1980s ushered in an era of horrific violence.

Traveling by bus from Guatemala City and into the Quiché highlands to the northwest, the urban bustle gave way to a dramatic landscape of rolling, verdant hills, though the awe inspired by that vista was soon displaced by a sense of menace. Army checkpoints appeared 30 minutes outside of Chichicastenango, where bus and car passengers lined up to show identity papers. Foreign tourists were generally exempt from the low-level suspicion and harassment shown to the Maya.

Two indigenous Maya girls retrieving water following a gun battle between members of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor and Guatemalan Army soldiers in San Juan Cotzal, Guatemala. 1982.

Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

I was familiar with Guatemala’s turbulent political history and the C.I.A.’s support of its 1954 coup. But I was relatively new to the daily terror tactics of Central America where U.S.-backed troops used fear and violence to contain a growing left-wing insurgency. But unlike in El Salvador, where the United States openly provided military advisers and equipment, American support for Guatemala’s military government was purposefully hidden and downplayed.

The military’s campaign of violence and terror was carried out with rigor and exactitude. The way to multiply a political murder’s horror was to leave corpses in full public view, like on the side of the road with a slit throat and torn-off clothing. “This could happen to you,” was the clear message sent to potential victims, warning them of the fate that awaited those suspected of supporting the rebels.

These weren’t peripheral incidents with marginal players but a closely-managed pacification campaign whose violent counterinsurgency tactics were supported by other right-wing anti-Communist countries and their military attachés and trainers in Guatemala. Taiwan provided anti-Communist psy-ops training; Argentina contributed counterintelligence and interrogation techniques from its own Dirty War; South Africa supplied communications equipment and training; while Israel provided weapons for the soldiers and infantry. A small number of Spanish-speaking U.S. Special Forces troops worked in the field and at military training camps.

In January 1982, I traveled with Christopher Dickey, The Washington Post’s correspondent, to the military headquarters in Santa Cruz del Quiché to speak with the Guatemalan Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Benedicto Lucas García. The French-trained general implemented a scorched-earth policy aimed at eliminating a growing insurgency in the indigenous areas of the western highlands. The rebellion was at its peak, and the Guatemalan guerrillas considered themselves allies of Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the leftist F.M.L.N in El Salvador.

Local civil defense forces outside their mountainous village in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala. 1982.

Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

The general invited Chris and me on a helicopter flight over the mountainous farming area of the Quiché, where they targeted the enemy with simple, deadly logic: Anyone running from our white Bell helicopter was either a guerrilla or a sympathizer.

Accompanied by two door-gunners and an intelligence officer, Gen. Lucas García sat in the co-pilot’s seat and directed the flight around the rural areas. We were 15 minutes from the provincial capital, flying about 1,500 feet, when he spotted a group of women running away from the approaching helicopter. He ordered the pilot to circle the farm below and bank the helicopter hard so the door gunners could have a better view.

Then he yelled out the command to open fire, “Dale! Dale!” — “Give it to them! Give it to them!”

The gunners blasted away in a hail of smoke and spent cartridges, the pilot turned and banked again, noisily circling above as civilians were cut down with the American-supplied M60 machine guns. Gen. Lucas García explained to us that since the campesinos (peasant farmers) had run away from the helicopter, they had to have been guilty. When The Washington Post published Chris’s story, Gen. Lucas García denied he ever ordered his men to fire, even though a photograph of the door-gunner in action (Slide 3) accompanied the story.

On various occasions in the early 1980s, I left El Salvador to work in Guatemala, photographing in the Ixil triangle and western highlands. I used a Rollei 2¼ camera, a tripod and black-and-white film. The film, from Todos Santos and Nebaj, had been in storage and mostly unseen since 1985.

At the time, the violence in the highlands was fearful, mysterious and intimidating. Asking villagers in Todos Santos and Nebaj to sit for a portrait, I felt the best I could hope for was a glimpse of their dignity and independence and what they were desperately trying to hold onto in the midst of the cruel, scorched-earth injustices and devastating military sweeps: Exactly what the blasé embassy spokesman had dismissively wanted us to overlook.